Ok, I’ll admit it – I took a break. Just a few hours break after working silly long hours in the past few days. Why silly hours? And why did I need a break?

Why silly hours?

You know that feeling when you work on a project and you have so many things to do, that you forget about simple things such as a break?

You feel “in the zone” and everything is going as you planned. You feel unstoppable. You are smashing one task and feature after the other and the time just flies.

Before you know it – it’s 3am!

When do you need a break?

After a few late nights (or actually ‘early mornings’), I started to feel a bit slower.

Slower in thinking, and slower in doing things.

Everything was taking me longer, and my usually sharp problem solving skills were gone… not completely, but almost gone.

I thought to myself “I can’t have a break now, we are so close to the finish! Am I gonna stop working for a few hours or half a day?”

Yeah boy! That’s exactly when you really need that break!

The beach

Then I did it. I grabbed my new Go Pro camera, some cash for a coffee, and off I went. Very far from the computer, very far from any pixels, and very far from work.

It was a cold windy winter day, and I couldn’t ask for a better day for shooting a time-lapse video.

The retina 3D view of the beach and slowly moving clouds was exactly what I needed.

Here is the video.

The result?

As I was sitting there freezing with a cup of coffee in my hands, waiting for enough frames, I started writing.

Yes, I was still thinking about the project, but apart from this blog post, I have also put together a list of things which will help us to make the project even better.

Suddenly I saw the project and the surrounding challenges from a completely different angle.

‘Thinking about the same issues in different places, leads to different ideas.’

Try it yourself.

Things were just popping up in my head like mushrooms after the rain. Things which I haven’t thought about before.

Suddenly I had my head full of mushrooms.

It felt amazingly refreshing.

PS: I almost forgot to mention the fantastic fish’n chips I grabbed on the way back, which made the day even more special.

Conclusion

If you ever feel that you can’t have a break, you definitely need one.

Go, grab your Go Pro and show me your time-lapse. Go mushroom picking. It doesn’t matter what you do on your break, you will feel refreshed anyway.

And you never know, while you’re waiting there in the freezing cold wind – you might just come up with the next killer idea. Good luck.

What is your indicator for having a break? Let me know in the comments below.